“We need to think beyond images as a reflection of history, and instead consider how they constitute it” – Sumathi Ramaswamy

In May, Sumathi Ramaswamy visited LSE to talk about the artist M. F. Husain and how his work contributed to the aesthetics of India’s Emergency. After her presentation, she spoke to Sonali Campion about visual history, the challenge of making artwork more widely available, and why Husain is such a controversial artist in India

Between seas and continents: aspects of the scientific career of Hermann Von Ihering, 1850-1930

This paper covers some periods in Hermann von Ihering’s scientific trajectory: his training in zoology in Germany and Naples, his international activities based in Brazil, and his return to Germany. It deals with aspects of the formulation of his theories on land bridges. It focuses on the network of contacts he maintained with German émigrés like himself, and primarily with Florentino Ameghino, which allowed him to interact in international scientific circles. It mentions excerpts of his letters and his publications in the periods when he began corresponding with Ameghino (1890), when he travelled to Europe in search of support for his theories (1907), and when he published his book on the history of the Atlantic Ocean (1927).Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Muse

Passions of the tongue: language devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970

Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language

When a Language Becomes a Mother / Goddess: An Image Essay on Tamil

This essay has an unusual protagonist: a language that comes to be transformed into an object of love and devotion, producing in the process an unusual visual presence for a spoken tongue. I write of Tamil, a language that currently counts more than 70 million speakers in India and Sri Lanka, and in Singapore, Malaysia, and other parts of the global South Asian diaspora. With a deep and complex history on the subcontinent rivaled only by Sanskrit, Tamil inspired the praise and adoration of many of its speakers from its early recorded literary history traceable back to the opening years of the first millennium of the common era. In the later half of the nineteenth century in colonial India, this admiration intensified to the point that the language was imagined as a mother/goddess variously referred to as Tamilttay, Tamil Annai, and Tamil Tevi. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, the veneration of and devotion to the mother/goddess Tamil variously fueled powerful movements for religious revitalization, the deepening of linguistic pride and love for Tamil literature, a vigorous assertion of Tamil identity, even a separatist movement for independent statehood free of India. In the course of such developments, Mother Tamil or Tamilttay herself no longer remains just a goddess of language, learning and literature, but also emerges as a mistress of territory and polity

Global Encounters, Earthly Knowledges, Worldly Selves

Focused on the colonial school in the British India as the principal site for disciplined encounters between the learning child and the terrestrial globe as a scientific instrument, this essay considers the work of Geography in transforming young Indians into colonized but enlightened subjects over the course of the 19th century, even as it is instrumental in precipitating “modern Earth” as the subject of study. As I follow the pedagogic travels of the globe across the subcontinent, I ask why almost the very first issue with which the native child was confronted when beginning on this novel enterprise of a geographical education was the shape of the earth. Why did the colonial teacher of any ilk feel compelled to convince the Indian child, again and repeatedly, about terrestrial sphericity? And what is this knowledge of Earth’s sphericity pitched against? Not least, I take up three life-stories marked by significant “global” encounters to show that there is no single path to the formation of a planetary consciousness centered on a modern Earth brought into view through an Enlightened encounter with its miniaturized proxy.Centrée sur l’école coloniale dans l’Inde britannique comme le principal lieu de rencontres disciplinées entre l’enfant qui apprend et le globe terrestre comme instrument scientifique, cette étude considère la part de la géographie dans la transformation de jeunes Indiens en sujets colonisés mais éclairés au cours du xixe siècle, même si elle joue un rôle dans le déclenchement de la « Terre moderne » en tant qu’objet d’étude. En suivant de près les voyages pédagogiques du globe à travers le sous-continent, on se demande pourquoi la toute première question ou presque à laquelle l’enfant natif a été confronté au commencement de cette nouvelle entreprise d’un enseignement de la géographie était la forme de la terre. Pourquoi les enseignants coloniaux de tout acabit se sentent obligés de continuer à convaincre l’enfant indien que la terre est ronde ? Et contre quoi ce savoir de la sphéricité de la Terre est-il dirigé ? Enfin et surtout, on examine trois histoires de vie marquées par d’importantes rencontres « autour du globe » pour montrer qu’il n’y a pas qu’une seule voie pour former une conscience planétaire axée sur une terre moderne donnée à voir à travers une rencontre éclairée avec sa projection en miniature